Peter Starr on Wisdom and Culture
Photos: Brittanica (Morrison), Rolling Stone (Miranda), Wikipedia (Bechdel), Brittanica (Erdrich), Massive Science (Le Guin), Harvard Crimson (Adichie), Alan Elkann Interviews (McEwan), Penguin Random House (Ozeki), Wikipedia (Marker)
Continue reading “Wisdom Matters: Reading Literature for a Wiser World”Some moments in human history are clearly wiser than others. In politics, and in social life more generally, ours seems strikingly unwise.
Photo: Medium
Continue reading “A More Novelistic Approach”We do not usually associate wisdom with beginners, but here is a new writer endowed with the gift of ancient storytellers.
Chinua Achebe, “Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie”
Photo: The New York Times
Continue reading “Something Else Stands Beside It”What is both unfortunate and unjust is the pain the person dispossessed is forced to bear in the act of dispossession itself and subsequently the trauma of a diminished existence…. The psychology of the dispossessed can be truly frightening.
Chinua Achebe, Home and Exile
Photo: Nasty Women Writers
Continue reading “Simply Human”It is only by seeing ourselves as fundamentally other—the contingent product of a culture that has no particular monopoly on truth—that we can come into our wisest possible, most “utterly human” selves.
Continue reading “Empathy and Cultural Dislocation”When I think about how I understand my role as citizen, setting aside being president, and the most important set of understandings that I bring to the position of citizen, the most important stuff I’ve learned I think I’ve learned from novels. It has to do with empathy.
Barack Obama, in Conversation with Marilynne Robinson
Photo: Sans soleil, dir. Chris Marker
Continue reading “The Poignancy of Things”Chris Marker’s Sans soleil exemplifies the journey to wisdom, without once mentioning that concept.
Photo: Raphael, The School of Athens (detail), antigonejournal.com
Continue reading “Rethinking Liberal Education”Narrative imagination is an essential preparation for moral interaction. Habits of empathy and conjecture conduce to a certain type of citizenship and a certain form of community: one that cultivates a sympathetic responsiveness to another’s needs, and understands the way circumstances shape those needs, while respecting separateness and privacy.
Martha Nussbaum, Cultivating Humanity
Continue reading “In Praise of Small Sanities”No wise liberal has ever thought that liberalism is all of wisdom…. Liberalism isn’t a political theory applied to life. It’s what we know about life applied to a political theory.
Adam Gopnick, In Praise of Small Sanities
Continue reading “Does Wisdom Lean Left?”Wisdom does not “lean left” so much as “lean liberal.” If wisdom has a party, it is the party of philosophical liberalism and its historic fellow traveler, liberal education.
Photo: News Medical
Continue reading “What is Wisdom?”Wisdom as I understand it is a capacity for sound judgment with a view to pragmatic action. Wise judgment is attuned to cognitive complexities in the world and to the ways in which historical and cultural contexts inform diverse systems of value. Whatever their domain of action, wise practitioners evince high degrees of intellectual humility and empathy, together with a thoroughgoing commitment to fostering the well-being of both one’s self and one’s community.